


lacuna

by aosc



Series: I gave you all my soul [2]
Category: Bleach
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-04-30 17:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5172188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aosc/pseuds/aosc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>Lacuna</b>: noun (plural <i>lacunae</i> ləˈkjuːniː or <i>lacunas</i>)<br/>An unfilled space; a gap</p>
            </blockquote>





	lacuna

**Author's Note:**

> i will give this warning: the timeline in this halfway series is all screwed with. it's post-grimmjow and ichigo battles in hueco mundo, but it's also past the invasion, with aizen still waiting to do one over on karakura. so. yeah. no canonical timeline, really.

* * *

  
The last time he stepped foot in the human world, he was tuning into smelling sandalwood and salt on Kurosaki's skin from distance, and grappling for the finely reddish pink strand of his soul, twining with the barely translucent other ribbons curling in midair.

 

Kurosaki. Half a scythe on his back and a pointed frown. His presence is barely more than a ripple through the air when Grimmjow has his fingers twined through the Shinigami woman's short hair, her blood and guts and heart pulsing around the flex of muscles in his arm. Certainly not the opposition he's looking for; has a jackrabbit pulse that Grimmjow has a tough time imagining in someone seasoned in taking lives, and the wide, horrified eyes of someone who's never truly understood the meaning of strength.

 

Strength is not the measure of your hand on someone else's shoulder in support. Nor is it the punch of his voice when Kurosaki says,  _Rukia_ , hoarse and disbelieving. Strength is the measure of how you kill. Of how _many_ you have killed. The prickle of thorns on your crown.

 

Grimmjow had grinned, and thrown the Shinigami aside, _Rukia_ , blood stretching, pooling on the asphalt around the curl of her frame. He had smelled the fear, raw and tangy, on Kurosaki's neck, the pulse of the carotid standing out blue on his throat.

 

Now, he draws the thin of a Garganta ragged in the air, less of a gateway and more of an exhausted stairway that he barely manages to keep open to stretch through. It's a miscalculation; he stumbles with Kurosaki's pale, sunken frame on his back midair just above a building, and the tumble they take makes him grunt when something splinters and snaps in his left wrist, used to leverage his knees and Kurosaki's weight level with the rooftop so that they won't crash straight into it.

 

Kurosaki retains a tang of blood on him, but otherwise, Karakura smells of a night that doesn't grate of sand between the clench of your teeth. The crescent dips into the razor of buildings jutting up far away, and Grimmjow rises, careful to haul Kurosaki along with him, up into the hill of the moon, to gaze out above the blocks of building. "Oi," he mutters, voice just low enough to agree with the way his vocal chords strain, and his knees would shake, if he were  _weak_. "Kurosaki, how the hell am I s'pposed to find anyplace in this town? Wake up 'n smell your damn coffee."

 

Kurosaki gives a stutter of breath, and his chest contracts against the low of Grimmjow's back, lungs expanding around a rattling cough.

 

"Forget it then." Grimmjow bunches his fingers more firmly in the slice of Kurosaki's shihakushō that is partially open to his chest, secures him across himself, and descends from the building, down into the streets that are deserted and dark and silent.

 

* * *

  

The last time Grimmjow came to the human world, it was to put a balled up fist through Kurosaki's side, tear through his oblique muscle and his liver, leave a mark, scratched down his chest. Leave him wide eyed and hollow, and if not to kill him - then to mark. Maim. Be able to lick blood from the long of his index finger as an afterthought and taste a fear and a loathing thicker than the disgusting comraderie the Shinigami had displayed through Ulquiorra's bleak recollection of their initial clash.

 

Now, Grimmjow busts through a locked door with the sole of his foot, and crashes into the void of a dark house on the bay of sleep, where he senses one of the intangible ribbons of souls as slightly more liquid than just smoke. A watery blue, but it's the significant blue of someone who's had prolonged exposure to spirits. A flicker, when he shuts his eyes and feels -- a pillar of murky light.

 

Grimmjow can guess already before he hears the stress of footsteps approaching the wind of the staircase, that he kicked in the right door.

 

Kurosaki's father looks nothing like his son, turning up in the twist of the stairs dark haired and with an angular jaw, but Grimmjow sees in the look he levels him with that it's his kid that he has slung fever shivering over his shoulder, and that he'd do best in behaving.

 

He thinks of Hueco Mundo. Of swept hills of sand, and on the cavities in which Kurosaki's blood still lays like foreboding -- a warning, mirroring predators and the constant moon at day and during night. Of how easy it would have been to defer to the instinctive punch of death. Of tearing Kurosaki down, teeth bared bloody. But this isn't Hueco Mundo, and Grimmjow feels an ache in his marrow that is the faded pulse of something tired.

 

He raises an eyebrow at the relative stillness of the figure atop the stairs. "Ya just gonna stand around, wait for the sun to start shinin'?"

 

Ichigo's father takes deliberate steps down the stairs, soles soft, gaze locked on him at all times. Grimmjow frowns. This is not the spooked father who wakes to a stranger barreling through the wood of his front door, carrying his unconscious son, pale and drained and slung, rag doll like.

 

"In my day, Hollows carried the corpses of Shinigami back to their hideouts, they didn't deliver them to their fathers."

 

Grimmjow eyes him then, instinctively wary. " _'In my day',_ old man?" he repeats, "who're you?"

 

Kurosaki's father reaches the descent of the stairs. He chuckles. "These days I am just an old man, clearly," he says, stopping. He stares pointedly at where there is a small tick in the tendons keeping Grimmjow's left knee stable. And Grimmjow's back twinges beneath the added weight, and his wrist is swollen to double its size, fuckin' Kurosaki. "May I -- ?"

 

Grimmjow releases a breath he didn't realize he was holding, when Kurosaki's father reaches tentatively for him, taking the tips of his fingers to the bared teeth of a wounded animal, and grips Kurosaki's shoulder. It's an odd scene, he figures, letting the old man slip an arm around Kurosaki's waist and haul him gently from the curve that Grimmjow has fitted for him. A concave just beside his spine that otherwise would have been straight, proud, bent for no one.

 

"Thank you," Kurosaki's father murmurs, steadying his son at his hip, the roll of his head leaned against the thick of the man's tricep. Grimmjow shrugs, the situation off kilter, alien. In the spill of light inside the hallway he sees just his own shadow sway, a familiar reflection, and he'd take comfort in straightening, ignore the ways in which his body strains and small cuts and bruises yawn red and blue and too visible on him. But he sways, again, harder, and feels his stomach drop, his lungs tighten.

 

The dissonance in collapsing only after he's made sure that Kurosaki is steadied on his father, enclosed by the walls of something that is a home, rings in his ears, his mind, and blackens only gradually, along with the edges of his conscience.

 

* * *

 

The sunlight Grimmjow will always be used to is pale and harsh; it needles thinly through your eyelids, and will illuminate best chunks of bones; skeletal remains. Through a cloud of sand it's a dull orange. It is never warm, and never a glow, fizzing out at the edges, soft.

 

He can faintly recall the heat of the sun in the human world. Sweating, something out of a fever dream, gripping tight at his ribs and enveloping him. He dreams of Kurosaki's faltering grin, teeth bared, fingers torn apart. The slice of the Getsuga, black and red, wiping out a sandstorm that is larger than what they do to each other. Than mortal death.

 

He dreams of the forest, and of the dunes. Of Las Noches, the angles of the throne.

 

He wakes to a gentle patter on a nearby pane of glass, startling at the noise that is more of someone else's memory that he feels he's remembering, than something that he's seen, somewhere, at some point. He blinks up to see the slide of rain over glass, making wobbly figures and stretching out spindly roads across it. For a while, he's transfixed at seeing something that is not the dusty planes of the desert. Not stone whetting the glass until it is round and scratched down to its very core. He almost traces its lines and its chases, only stopping himself because that's something children do, and where the fuck is he?

 

The room is lightly grey, not only reflecting the stale sky, but pale inwardly. Grimmjow thinks it's meant to be soothing, but his senses are not human, and all it does is flash days foregone past of when a swale of the forest cast nothing but watery shadows on the climb of the walls, enveloping him in something not quite alive, ever.

 

He shakes the thought, overcome with it as quickly as he rids himself of it, and carefully feels behind him to a place where he can put his uninjured wrist, to leverage himself upwards. Getting up proves a harder challenge than expected. He's been sleeping on a futon, which is low enough, but his knees are lead, and his joints are swollen to the point of protruding, and rising without feeling his entire body protesting is an impossible task.

 

He wonders when he became weak enough to allow this.

 

He wonders when he became weak enough to allow a sense of camaraderie to worm its way into his breast, curling there like an animal, or a white hot iron. When Kurosaki became anything but an objective to complete. The bloodlust to sate.

 

At one point, he could see red and become breathless with it. Seeing Ichigo torn up before the yawn of Hueco Mundo's sun, the cuts of his body illuminated with light and blood trickling from where Grimmjow's landed a punch in the corner of his mouth. Chest scratched and bleeding, forearms bruising. When he'd gotten tangled up in the chain slapping from the hilt of Zangetsu's released form, landed close enough to Ichigo to count his eyelashes, clumped together with dirt and blood and salt.

 

In Grimmjow's world, Ichigo's hair is matted with sweat and blood and his eyes are black and rimmed golden, and raw force rolls off of him.

 

The door whines as it is warily pushed halfway open, someone stepping through with measured weight in their steps.

 

In this world, Ichigo is pale, but clean; a t-shirt hanging off of the fan of his collar bone, his left arm wrapped in white bandages when he rounds the door. It hits Grimmjow in a way he doesn't expect it to.

 

"' _You're welcome_ '?" Grimmjow snaps, and forces himself off of the futon, "The hell kinda closing speech is that, dumbass? Lame as all fuck, 's what it is."

 

Ichigo startles, surprised. He doesn't expect it anymore than Grimmjow does, knees still on the verge of giving out, tongue slipping on his own words.

 

"Oi, I wasn't planning on kicking the bucket, if that's what you were thinking," Ichigo mutters. But he reaches up to palm at the back of his neck, and the bridge of his nose tinges with an apologetic pink, so Grimmjow has already called his bullshit.

 

"You're a shitty liar, Kurosaki."

 

Something settles in his chest. Something foreign -- intruding. He presses a snort between his teeth. Ichigo glares.

 

"Fuck you. I still saved your unapologetic ass."

 

Grimmjow wants to fight him on that particular issue, protest, he doesn't need _saving_. Certainly not by the likes of _him_. And yet, here they are, Ichigo wrapped up, and Grimmjow finding himself wearing a long sleeve shirt stretched and made threadbare by someone distinctly human. Finding himself skittishly on the edge, ready to make for the wet windows over by the far wall, yet not. There is something that wants to claw its way out of his gut, but also something that makes him stay, dare to stare Ichigo in the eye and hold his gaze. Something that pushes from inside of his lungs. 

 

"Whatever," Grimmjow says, "We're even, aren't we?"

 

Ichigo hesitates. There is something weighing on his tongue, but he doesn't speak, and Grimmjow thinks that to be even, there's been a conscious exchange of services. A mutual agreement. As if this is what they are now. Indebted. Cleared. Something that latches onto the both of them to pull them together -- closer, until Grimmjow suffocates on his own complicity, unwilling or no.

 

Once, he sat upon a throne made out of calcified rock and withering twines of roots, and at that time, there was nothing more to life than living. Making it out of the yawn of death, _alive_.

 

"We're not _"even"_ ," Ichigo says, frowning, "I didn't do what I did 'cause I wanted something from you in return."

 

Grimmjow snorts, "What, that's just a stunt you pull? Don't make me laugh, Kurosaki; ya don't pull yer enemy outta the line of fire 'cause you're feelin' particularly charitable once in a blue moon."

 

"No -- that's not it," Ichigo says, turning away, turning back, worrying the hem of his t-shirt between his thumb and index finger, "I just don't think you've got it coming, you know? No one deserves to die, just like that."

 

There is a dip of frustration in the lines of his mouth and in his brow, and Grimmjow might not have been gifted a people persona, but he knows when Kurosaki's pressing a lie through his teeth. This ain't the time. "That your heroic reasoning?" he asks, instead, and feels how it's trapped between contempt and disbelief. "Don't screw around."

 

Ichigo half shrugs, and looks from the floor. There's something rebellious in his gaze that doesn't crystallize in his voice, but Grimmjow sees it simmering. "I can't make you believe me," he says, and turns, as if to go -- leave the rattling unnamed in Grimmjow's body be. Grimmjow finds that he can't move further than he's already done. "There's some leftover rice and tuna downstairs," Ichigo says, as though an afterthought. "Yuzu, my baby sister, insists you should eat."

 

He doesn't eat. Come evening, the rain ceases, and the patter against the window fades, becomes an oppressive silence that he knows comes with thinking about things winding so far down the line that you couldn't ever hope to find the answer to them.

 

* * *

 

He wakes with a start the next morning, swallowing a stuttering breath and reaching blindly for Pantera at his hip, until he realizes that his zanpakutō is a white line leaned against the far wall, and the audible crash is followed by a string of harsh curses which then abruptly quietens. Another violent noise breaks out, glass shattering, the silence breaking, and then it seems to die out. Grimmjow frowns, and swings his legs over the side of the futon. Automatically responding to violent noises is a life long tick, a habit of force, so when he tentatively rises, turning towards the door, one fist white knuckled clenched, it's borne out of self preservation. A blind desire to keep himself alive.

 

He opens the door, only to be faced with Ichigo's father clawing his way up from the wrong side of the railing lining the upper floor, twisting down into the stairs. The man, dressed in robes, has one foot agile over the railing, and half a hip resting against the boards. Grimmjow unclenches his fist, and finds that he can't not stare. Ichigo's father hangs for another minute, not particularly attempting to climb back, but not seemingly breaking a sweat where he's hanging. His gaze finds Grimmjow, and he salutes, grinning, one hand letting go of the railing to greet him.

 

"Father!" Comes from downstairs, chiding, "One day, you're going to end up hurting yourself really bad!"

 

"The only shame is that _one day_ didn't end up being today," supplies Ichigo, suddenly there, and Grimmjow is close to startling. He's rounding the corner, and stops, not noticing Grimmjow at first, to glare at his father. "I'll peel your fingers off of the railing, old man," he mutters.

 

Ichigo's father swoons from where he's hanging. "My son! So hurtful!"

 

Grimmjow raises an eyebrow. "What the fuck," he says, thinking out loud.

 

Ichigo turns, surprised, seemingly, to see him there. "Grimmjow," he says, letting it bleed into his tone. Something twists, unwilling, in him.

 

"In the flesh, Kurosaki," he replies, "Is the circus in town or somethin'?"

 

Ichigo rolls his eyes, "Every day," he replies, a chord sardonic. As though there is not blood between them, not scars palpable and still raw on Grimmjow's chest, still bruises and calcifications in their bones. As though Grimmjow looks at Ichigo and sees -- fuck, _Ichigo_. A point farther than temporary armistice. Ichigo's quiet breathing into his breastbone. The knot tight in his stomach at hearing the syllables of his name roll off of his tongue in ways that are not hostile.

 

Without the sharp intent to kill. He's not entirely familiar with what to do with that, or any of it.

 

* * *

 

He's vaguely familiar with the concept of cabin fever, and waits for it with something worrying like bile in his throat. It doesn't come when he expects it to.

 

The Kurosakis aren't what he expects -- either. Perhaps that's what does it, without being particularly speculative. He learns, through communicating mainly by grunts and blank stares, that the younger sister -- Yuzu, sees a watered out version of him, as though seeing the blurry movements of his body through a stream. She startles every time she notices the blank shot hollow in his stomach, but always speaks softly and rolling. And Karin -- the older, watches him warily, and speaks in monotones and short sentences. That Isshin -- Kurosaki's goofy father, offers him sake on that evening, unreadable, slipping through the grasp you think you have. Sometimes, he kicks his son out of bed, literally, and sometimes, he is secretive and worries a weary smile and says things such as, _you're an invention that shouldn't have been possible, but maybe that's just an old man talking again_.

 

Grimmjow accepts the glass, a large bowl, the liquor cold and swirling pale yellow, and looks at Isshin long. "Kurosaki doesn't know, does he?"

 

" _Ichigo_ ," Isshin pressures, gently, "doesn't know many things," and lips at his glass.

 

"Right and wrong aren't concepts that really concern me," Grimmjow says, "but -- ain't that a little rich?"

 

"Right or wrong, it probably is," Isshin agrees, "but it's nothing unless you know."

 

Grimmjow can accept that up front for what it is. He swallows his sake in one mouth, letting it rest burning on his tongue until it starts to prickle and itch. He waits for his body to do the same, and finds that when it doesn't -- he heads up again, for lack of knowing what to do with himself.

 

* * *

 

Shinigami are inept at assassinating and gathering intel quietly, he thinks, up until he is rustled only by a breeze he knows can't come from anything but a window he has not opened, and by the press of a blade against his throat that he knows can't be pressed there by someone in the house.

 

The Shinigami, Rukia, he remembers, straddles him with the curved blade of a bichuwa-type dagger pressed against the side of his neck. If she pushes, and twists, as is the blade's design, he'll be bled dry in less than two minutes. Her hair shadows her cheek bones sharp in the murky light, only illuminated from the lamps canting the street outside, and her eyes are calm. One, two three, Grimmjow counts her heartbeat to lesser than a resting pulse. Bradycardia is not so much a condition of the heart as it is consciously knowing -- and adjusting your body accordingly, to that what you are doing, you are going to have to do with precision.

 

"Shinigami," Grimmjow says, and presses up onto the blade just to prove a point.

 

"Arrancar," Rukia replies, remaining very still across his waist. "What is your business here?"

 

A laugh stutters, and dies, in his throat. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

 

She presses forward. He feels his skin split with no more force than a knife would give through melting butter. It barely stings, or so he tells himself. "I'm going to do you the courtesy of asking one more time before I tear through your throat and your vertebrae," she says, and to her credit, she's remaining extremely polite.

 

Grimmjow glares up at her. "I'm here on vacation, what the fuck does it look like, woman?" he spits, but he doesn't have a death wish, so when she for a split second looks like she's going to slide her wrist downwards, he holds a flat palm up, a proverbial white flag hanging limp there. "And I'd really love it if ya didn't, you know, shove that through my windpipe as I'm talkin'."

 

She eases the pressure only slightly. His pulse picks up. Perhaps they ain't too bad at sneaking, but letting up on plea alone is _weak_.

 

He snaps her guarded wrist before she has the appropriate momentum to react on, and wrenches his hips upwards. Rukia only loses her balance before she catches it, but it's enough for him to wrestle the dagger away from himself and twist her arm so that she has to give in to him as to not have it pop out of its socket. "Lose the fuckin' knife," he snaps, and twists her arm up further into her back, holding it there and holding her gaze, blood beating harshly in his ears. She hesitates. One, two, her heartbeat is still way below the point of where it should be for someone on the verge of killing. And for all that she is trained to be, he can't figure out why there is absolutely nothing betraying in the cuts of her expression.

 

She eventually drops the dagger, and it falls, falls, lodges just beside his calf, slipping easily through the sheets and mattress. He glares at her, still holding her arm twisted high and in danger of snapping from the curve of its stead.

 

" I -- " _Can't properly explain just why the hell I'm here_ , goes unsaid, and what he _is_ going to say fades in his mouth in a bout of conflicting thoughts. Rukia shifts her weight on his thighs, beckoning without saying anything.

 

"Are you here for Ichigo -- for Aizen?" she murmurs _Aizen_ as though it lays on her tongue poisonous. Spits it softly.

 

Grimmjow hesitates. "Not for Aizen," he replies, after a moment. "That asshole can fuck right back to whence he came -- and ya really should take offense at that."

 

Rukia seems to weigh his answer on her two scales of Shinigami justification. Grimmjow rolls his eyes. "If I woulda been interested in killin' him I sure as hell wouldn't have wasted my time chatting away with his dumb ass old man for _days_ before twistin' the knife. You're overestimatin' me here, Shinigami."

 

She stills. "You've been here for days?" Her tone is vaguely patronizing, and only vaguely does it mask her puzzle.

 

"Suspend your disbelief," Grimmjow says, sarcasm edging him now. "Just get off me -- for once, I really ain't interested in tearing your liver out of your stomach."

 

"Charming," Rukia comments, but she shakes her wrist from the loosening curl of his palm, and reaches deftly for the dagger, sliding off of him all the while. Grimmjow takes in the sweeps of her shihakushō, and the lieutenant rank wrapped bruisingly tight and weighing around her upper arm. Somewhere, someplace, Grimmjow thinks that he could have sympathized with her cause and her quiet efficiency.

 

She only stops at the window, letting breaths of cold air through, and looks back at him out of the corner of her eye. "If you so much as think -- "

 

"Then I'll have gutted him before he realizes there was a sword here for me to do it with," Grimmjow cuts her off, lazily waving at the shadow of her figure with a lot more _devil may care_ than he's feeling. She departs without bothering to dignify him with a response. He figures that she knows, whatever the fuck that means -- even to himself.

 

* * *

 

It means, he figures, that he's overdue leaving.

 

Staying in one place means committing to its spaces. Wandering its corners and staking out its highs and lows. In the valley, the only way was forward. Waiting for an ambush from the back was easy -- as was warding east, and west, both the inceptions of places he intimately knew without feeling for the presence of Hollows nearby.

 

He has never stayed in one place, though he's strayed far and wide in one world. He needs to leave, always, but he's never _needed to leave_.

 

Grimmjow's unable to sleep after the Shinigami leaves him alone with the echoes of what she meant, but did not say. So he leaves in the dripping wet morning. 

 

He dresses in the ripped and torn clothes that are his own. Reddish with dry blood and crusting with dirt, yes -- but it is something that proves that once, nothing scraped in his throat such as it does attempting to reply to Kurosaki who rolls Grimmjow's name between his tongue and his teeth in _that_ way. Kurosaki. It feels safe, reverting, slipping his hakama on, the short jacket fitting across his shoulders, and tip the window, which never closed properly, wide open. Pantera strapped to his waist.

 

He slips out the window, and breathes, eyes stuttering shut before the grey of the clouds amassing in the far sky.

 

"Grimmjow."

 

The air slips from his lungs as easy as water pushes at your lungs and your nose and your vision, without thought, and without much sound. Of course, it wouldn't be that easy.

 

He is _Hollow_ , and _Arrancar_ , and _Sexta_ , and he is a king in all but honorific. He is _Grimmjow --_  bitten off, mumbled around a mouthful of blood, coughed out in fear and loathing and distaste. He's heard Kurosaki utter the two syllables in his name in every single twist of tongue and sharp turn of temper. They've come so close to killing each other, only separated by the tip of scales and a blade.

 

Now, there is something soft in the roughness of Ichigo's voice, barely awake, and he remembers -- his body remembers, how it feels to be worn to your bones. He remembers, only vaguely, the shapes of how an ache would feel. Round edges -- and he feels that, when he turns around, to see Ichigo -- fuckin' dumbass, standing barefoot on the slippery wet tiles of the roof, gaze indecipherable.

 

"You comin' to wave me off, Kurosaki? Touching," he drawls, mustering up heat behind the words.

 

"Are you going back?" Ichigo asks, and there is genuine questioning in his words. Grimmjow vaguely wonders if he realizes any of this.

 

"Like I said -- we're even. Nothin' for me to sightsee here."

 

Ichigo steps further out, towards him. "I thought I told you that there is nothing to be even about. I've never looked for favors."

 

Grimmjow scoffs. "And I never looked to be _rescued_ , yet here we are, aren't we?"

 

Ichigo frowns. "You don't do anything out of emotional obligation," he says, and Grimmjow knows what it means, what he isn't saying. Between it all, he snaps. It's a simple equation to all of his problems, pooling into the cavity where all of his razed self expectations already lay in ruins.

 

"Don't act like you know me, _Shinigami_ ," Grimmjow spits, and meets Ichigo halfway across, anger hot underneath his skin. It's familiar, warm. "Like I do jack shit for anyone. Get off your high fuckin' horse."

 

"Yeah?" Ichigo snaps, and steps up close enough to fit just below Grimmjow's mouth, where his breath is a wisp of condense in the air. Grimmjow knows that there's a follow-up question there, hanging heavy between them, tripping off of Ichigo's tongue, but his lips are thin and pressed together and he stands, resolutely silent. It's the same wordless question the Shinigami woman had posed him with. Thick and imminent, but unspoken. It's a posed _why_? with a number of directions and a number of outcomes.

 

When Grimmjow last came to the human world, it was to trace, all the way from the inception of his soul, Ichigo to the bare of his skin. To rip and tear and kill. Now, he sees the quiet violence in his beating pulse, and smells familiarly sandalwood in the dip between his collar bones, and there is no desire to slide his sword between the stairs of two of his ribs. The only incentive in him is to act on an impulse welling up in his mouth strong and squalling, and he's fucking tired of second guessing whatever the fuck it is that he does.

 

He's always conquered. Taken.

 

The fingers he splays on the slice of skin over Ichigo's right hip are tentative until he feels the Shinigami's pulse quicken throughout his entire body -- the heart reverberating, heavy and pulsing, in his stomach, and then they turn bruising. And he thinks of all of the things which he could do, but the nail imprints and lilac prints he knows he will leave over the tip of the iliac crest is enough to make him shudder. Ichigo sighs, quietly, and looks at Grimmjow as he slowly -- reaching towards a snap of a jaw, rowed with sharp teeth, stretches his palm out over his sternum. Grimmjow's breath stutters, but he doesn't move.

 

"You're leaving?" Ichigo says, the in-between of a question and a statement. Grimmjow takes a moment to reply.

 

"'M right here," he murmurs, after some time.

 

Ichigo swallows around words, or the desire to speak, whichever comes first -- and only scratches blunt nails lightly down the tracings of Grimmjow's scar, leaving a gap -- the cavity of an empty space that doesn't so much have to be filled as it leaves a stretch of land uncharted.

 

* * *

 


End file.
